The term "mobile station", as used herein, includes a comprehensive set of mobile telecommunications units that share the common property of communicating information with a base station in a network by means of electromagnetic waves. Mobile stations include mobile telephone devices such as mobile wireless telephone sets and cellular telephone sets that are primarily designed to exchange voice information with a base station. The term also includes mobile data communications devices such as pagers, mobile facsimile machines, and global positioning system (GPS) vehicle locator devices that are primarily designed to exchange data. The term "mobile station" also includes hybrid devices such as personal communications services (PCS) units, that have both telephony and facsimile communications features. Communications by mobile stations can be by radio waves, such as are used in cellular radio telephony. However, mobile stations can also communicate over electromagnetic links that include Earth-orbiting satellites, or alternate electromagnetic links that include optical or infra-red radiation.
Where the base station is connected in a fixed supporting network to other communications nodes, the network requires routing information for the mobile station to enable the other communications nodes to send information to the mobile station. Registration is the process used by a mobile station to announce its current location and to enable the fixed supporting network to direct incoming calls to the appropriate base station. When a mobile station is brought into the operating range of a new base station, the mobile station must announce its current location. In order to accomplish this, the mobile station must send a message with its mobile identity number (MIN) to the new base station. The MIN is a number assigned to the mobile station by the fixed supporting network to enable billing the customer for services and to enable the network to route incoming calls. The MIN must be programmed into the mobile station prior to the first time that the unit is used by the customer. This process is called activation.
For example, normally, a mobile wireless telephone set may not initiate or complete radio telephone calls until it is registered with and authorized for service by a service provider. Mobile wireless telephone service providers require that any new customer take the mobile wireless telephone set to an authorized service center for programming so that the telephone set becomes authorized for service in the network. Information must be entered and stored into the mobile wireless telephone set which is specific to the mobile subscriber and specific to the desired service for the set. In cellular mobile telephone communication services, for example, such information is referred to as number assignment module (NAM) designation parameters. Examples of NAM parameters that the cellular telephone service provider now manually enters into the cellular telephone set include system identification, telephone number, access overhead class, group identification, initial paging channel, security lock code, local use flag, A/B system selection, and MIN mark flag. The cellular telephone customer must present the new cellular telephone set to the service provider or a representative so that the NAM module, which constitutes approximately 30 bytes of information, can be manually entered into the cellular telephone set. There are millions of new customers each year for cellular mobile telephone communication services. Hundreds of employees of the service provider or representative, located over a wide geographic area, are responsible for manually entering the NAM module into unprogrammed cellular telephone sets for the new customers. This necessitates the use of a centralized data base to assist the service provider in coordinating the activation process. The service provider's employee typically uses a workstation computer to enter the customer's application data. The workstation is remotely connected to the central data base and sends the new customer's application data to the data base for processing. The centralized data base may perform a credit check on the new customer, may keep track of available services, telephone numbers, network access data, and other information, and then assigns the MIN to the new customer's cellular telephone set. The MIN and other NAM parameters are transmitted by the centralized data base back to the service provider's workstation for manual entry by the employee into the cellular telephone set. This presents a cumbersome and costly procedure both to the customer as well as to the service provider.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system to automatically route activation information sent over-the-air from the mobile wireless telephone set, through the fixed supporting network to an over-the-air activation processor in the network, where the activation parameters for the NAM module can be prepared and automatically downloaded over the network and sent over-the-air to the mobile wireless cellular telephone set.